"Las Vegas' documentary a social, personal history

David Armstrong, EXAMINER MEDIA WRITER

Published 4:00 am, Friday, November 29, 1996

1996-11-29 04:00:00 PDT LAS VEGAS -- WHEN SUSAN BERMAN watches movies about Las Vegas and the Mob, she's generally unimpressed. They just don't ring true. In real life, she says, there are no operatic arias playing in the background, no mobsters cooking spaghetti together and taking care of the orphans. And the wise guys aren't as sleekly good-looking as the young Al Pacino.

So, Berman, who grew up in Las Vegas - and who, unbeknown to her until she hit her 20s, was the daughter of a gangster - decided to make her own movie. Not a made up story, but a documentary. And not a modest doc, but an ambitious one that covers all the city's history, from desert watering hole to party town for workers on Boulder Dam, to Mob casino town to wacko theme-park "family" destination.

The four-hour film, "Las Vegas,"" airs in two parts, 8-10 p.m. Sunday and 9-11 p.m. Monday on the Arts & Entertainment cable channel. Berman is lead writer, co-producer and one of several dozen people interviewed in the film.

"Vegas is not press-friendly," notes Berman, a Los Angeles writer who worked for The Examiner as a reporter in the early 1970s and went on to become a book author and widely published magazine writer. But, she notes, "a lot of people who wouldn't talk to anyone talked to us."

And therein lies a tale, outlined in the show and detailed in Berman's 1981 biography of her father, "Easy Street."

Davie Berman worked with the Jewish branch of the Mob. He was partners with Bugsy Siegel, and after Siegel was murdered, took over the Flamingo Hotel (and later the Riviera).

Davie Berman died when Susan was 12. Her mother killed herself the following year. Little Susan never knew what her doting father, who installed three very large men he called "friends" in the family home 24 hours a day, really did. Outwardly, he was a respectable, civic-minded businessman. "My father was very involved in setting up a middle class, core community," Berman said. "My parents were hotel owners. They adored me. I was an only child."

Growing up in Vegas was fun for Berman, who recalls Elvis Presley - on his first pass through the town where he would become a high glitz institution - singing "Happy Birthday" to her when she turned 12.

When she was very young, Vegas was still rustic. "I rode horseback on the Strip," says Berman, who is 51. "There were only seven hotels when I was growing up, until the '60s."

Not until Berman was older, a sophomore at UCLA, did she begin to uncover her father's dark past. She looked him up on a classmate's joking suggestion in a book about the Mob called "The Green Felt Jungle."

"I had absolutely no idea," she remembers. "I was 18 years old. I was absolutely devastated."

Berman later learned more, rifling the Examiner's morgue for old stories that showed her father had done time in Sing Sing, and still later reviewing his FBI files.

The new film, directed by Jim Milio, is a kind of reckoning for Berman, as well as a lively social history of Las Vegas, told through interviews and striking vintage film and photographs. Much of the material, she says, has never been shown before.

"Five years ago, I literally woke up and had this idea," she says. She went to the Big Three networks with a proposal. "But they wanted Ann-Margret and dead gangsters."

Ann-Margret didn't make the final cut in "Las Vegas," but there are a few dead mobsters. There is a photo of Siegel, dead on his girlfriend's couch, and memories of people who knew him. Referring to his death in gangster parlance, they say, "Bugsy took a cab."

But "Las Vegas" is about more than violence. Mostly, it is about gambling and money. And entertainment. And the points at which money and entertainment intersect.

There is priceless film of the Rat Pack - Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford - cavorting on the stages of hotels that have been leveled to make way for bigger, newer hotels. There is social commentary that recalls Las Vegas' segregated entertainment scene, questions about its huge waste of desert water, tales of tycoons like Howard Hughes and mega-hotel builder Steve Wynn.

Real and unreal

"Las Vegas is a real town, and it's an unreal town," says Berman. Real or unreal, for her it's a tough place to go back to, and she says she rarely returns.

Now, Vegas is a muse for Berman, who has written a memoir, a book called "Lady Las Vegas," tied to the documentary, and who hopes to sell an original screenplay of "Easy Street."

It's easier to write about Vegas than to live there. Write, and watch other people's movies about the place. Berman liked "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Desert Bloom," an independent film set in the Vegas of the 1950s atomic bomb tests.

She points out that Vegas is where the Martians land in the forthcoming Tim Burton spoof, "Mars Attacks!"